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Nouveau: A First Look

Merry Christmas!

A small preview of the Nouveau project.

Nouveau is a community project that is working on producing open-source 3D display drivers for NVIDIA graphics cards. Nouveau is not affiliated with NVIDIA Corporation and is an X.Org Foundation project. While this project is still far from being completed, for this holiday special we are sharing some of our first thoughts on this project from our experience thus far. We would like to make it very clear, however, that the Nouveau driver is no where near completed and still has a great deal of work ahead for the 3D component. This article today will also hopefully shed some light on the advancements of this project so far.

Michael: just an observation, but perhaps it's time to retire the artifact-inducing .jpg format and introduce artifact-free screenshots that have been taken in .png.

The artifacts are due to no re-sampling on image resizing. If you click on the image you should get a larger clearer version. Right now re-sampling isn't enabled due to the extra load it creates, but once we have the resources for a greater image server that will be taken care of. The images for all Phoronix articles are actually stored at a very high resolution and optimal settings, etc... on the server. Dynamically on page load it automatically resizes the image to predefined thresholds as well as watermarking the image.

Then run REnouveau when using the NVIDIA proprietary driver (preferably 1.0-9XXX). It will take a while to run completely (perhaps may be best to do it overnight). Then see the Wiki at nouveau.freedesktop.org for how/where to post the register dump.

All I can say is, my next machine is going to use an nV card and I think this project is a whole world of good if only to give nV some good competition. Who knows? If they can do SLi better than nV then nV will be forced to ramp up their game.